We head out just before eight for the coffee and breakfast shop round the corner. As with many Korean shops there is a common trend to have English titles then Korean contents. Thus we strode in and the "breakfast set" was a bit unintelligible. Anyway, I had coffee and a coleslaw and lettuce sandwich. Yum. Helen used the free Internet connection to reserve a hotel in Tokyo.
Seoul station is only two stops on the rush hour tube. And very efficient they are too [on the tube], people stepping forward at their stop and exiting cleanly. The main railway is a separate building much like any other large station. We started to ask for a ticket and were promptly redirected to the Information desk where they speak English. OK. Our plan to travel first class was thwarted by it being W33,000. Second class was W26,000, we'll take that then. We were discounted 5% for being by the door too! As we walked past first class we were a little down until we reached second which was really quite good: reclining chairs with audio jacks for the airline style LCDs along the aisle. Very much like an airline, in fact. My only complaint was the track was too jiggly for me to write my journal.
Korea seems to have had plenty of investment across the nation, a lot of new high rise buildings in the towns, in fact, few old buildings to be seen. A lot of road (and rail) infrastructure, several times we saw [new] viaducts spanning long shallow valleys, new road tunnels, etc.. A hilly, if not too forested, landscape though a great deal of the flatter land devoted to agriculture. It makes a change to see a winter/spring vista. Hardly any greenery.
Gyeongju is just as overcast as Seoul and possibly a little colder. We march down the road aiming for one tourist hotel but a noisy crowd of a hundred or more schoolkids diverts us onto a parallel road, luckily towards a second. It seems to be a very full city, this part, downtown, is full of shops in all directions for the kilometre we walk. Around one corner we spot the first of the Silla (pronounced schilla) burial tombs -- huge grassy mounds -- which dominate the area. Before we spot our targetted hotel there's a newer one over the road seemingly offering discounts which we take up. W49,000 seems a lot better for a very nice room. We felt like the first occupants.
After a quick warm up (and lots of buttons to press [-- the main light was under remote control as well as the TV, air con...]) we head out for lunch. Passing a few hard to decifer Korean restaurants we find an intelligible one which turns out to be a tourist restaurant. It's OK but we haven't seen any other tourists. We then take to the tombs, fortunately not too far away. 
They follow a common theme of a wooden casket and personal effects box in a wooden chamber covered in a lot of boulders and covered in earth. Often over 20m high they are quite easily seen in this low-rise city.
The next block [of mounds] has an entrance fee (a whole W1500) where post-excavating one tomb they've turned it into a little exhibition. As we were looking a man burst in and wanted to show us around. We tried to decline but he insisted he was a complimentary guide. Go on then. He was OK, a few more things to saw than on the labels on the items plus some rumours of his own. He was determined the king was a great eskimo. Right.
I'm sure it was getting colder outside but we pressed on going down to the Cheomseongdae Observatory. Despite seeing it was a short stone tower I insisted we pay W300 (about 12p) to go inside the compound to see it up close. It was a short stone tower with a hole in it. The oldest astronomical observatory in Asia, apparently. I should note that we did pass half a dozen American kids. The few other tourists. It really was quite cold now so we headed off for another coffee. Again the English title, Korean everything else caught us out. I had a very cinamonny coffee. But it was hot.
We went for a wander around town, a couple of puppies in a window drawing our attention for a while. We saw a Hertz office which sounds a better idea than gloveless bicycling tomorrow. The absence of tourists presumably not directly because of the lack of cashpoints but we only found two that would talk to us, the first going through the motions before, I assume, reporting an on screen error in Korean. That's the third ATM failure in Korea.
We dropped the bags off at the hotel and stayed a couple of hours to warm up. We then strode out to get some tea. An hour later after wandering the streets in search of food, even with just English names, without repeating our lunch venue nor McDonalds, Pizza Hut or KFC, left us in Sally's Pizzas where even there there were a few problems. For a start she took Helen's order then just walked off. Excuse me, I'd like some food too! At least numbers are the same and they type the bill into the ever ready [ie. handy] calculator for us to [see and] hand over cash.
When we get back the attached nightclub is blaring away. Hmph. CNN, in an attempt to diffuse the situation, is insisting on repeatedly showing the marine putting the US flag over the statue of Saddam Hussein. The fear being that Iraqis and Arabs will view it as the act of an occupying army rather than liberators.
INNS Tourist Hotel, Gyeongju N35.84217 E129.20512 Elev. -32m!
Copyright 2003 Ian Fitchet. All rights reserved.